Buffalo’s Harvard Man

There is only one professional football team that plays home games in the state of New York, but Buffalo, and its Bills, are seven hours away from New York City by car. Buffalo natives are manically defensive of their town, and their team—but to downstaters, content to cheer the dual circus shows put on by the Jets and Giants in New Jersey, Buffalo might as well be Boise. The city doesn’t have much going for it. America’s post-industrial economy has not been kind—and the winters never are. It’s the second smallest city to maintain an N.F.L. franchise, after Green Bay—Buffalo’s population declined by ten per cent in the last decade—and the football franchise has offered mostly heartbreak. The Bills have never won a Super Bowl, and rather famously lost four in a row back in the nineties.

Who could possibly save this hardscrabble outpost? A Harvard man, of course. “Can Ryan Fitzpatrick’s Brain Save Buffalo?” ESPN’s new Web site, Grantland, asked last month. Fitzpatrick is the team’s serviceable quarterback distinct for going to college not at an S.E.C. or Big Ten institution, but at a certain university just north of the Charles River. (No word on which dorm—forgive me, house—he lived in.) Since Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers were drafted, few articles have made much of the fact that the N.F.L.’s two best quarterbacks went to two of America’s finest public universities (Michigan and California-Berkeley). But few reporters have written about the 2011 Bills without mentioning Fitzpatrick’s undergraduate education.

We get it: he’s a smart guy, with a 1580 on the S.A.T. and a forty-eight out of fifty on the Wonderlic football I.Q. test. (Cam Newton, this year’s No. 1 pick, scored a twenty-one.) Boastfulness is not limited to Cambridge, however, and the Boston College graduate in me feels the need to note that former Eagles linebacker Mike Mamula scored a forty-nine. The only perfect score did, admittedly, go to Pat McInally, a Harvard grad, but let the record show: he was a punter.

More importantly, Fitzpatrick has been a pretty good quarterback, leading the Bills to a 4-1 start, though its unclear what role the Harvard faculty played in developing his quick release. (Malcolm Gladwell has written about the difficulty of predicting a quarterback’s success in pro football.) He has helped make the Bills not only an uplifting underdog story, but a particularly entertaining one. Their defense has been terrible—worse than all but two N.F.L. teams—but the offense has been prolific—better, again, than all but two. Only the Patriots, worst and second-best in those categories, have had more disparate levels of success on each side of the ball. On Sunday, Fitzpatrick will bring his economics degree south to MetLife Stadium to face Eli Manning (Ole Miss, marketing, 3.44 G.P.A.). The Giants are favored by three. The over/under figure on how many times the announcers mention Fitzpatrick’s undergraduate institution is considerably higher.

Photograph: Drew Hallowell/Philadelphia Eagles/Getty Images.

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